Marriage
Marriage and family relationships are perhaps the central theme of Revolutionary Road. No marriage presented to us is a stable one, especially the central focus, Frank and April. Yates examines what makes or breaks a married relationship under a microscope for the reader, and shows us the tragedy of misunderstanding and miscommunication after the novel.
April and Frank simply cannot relate to one another. Frank is relatively comfortable in his skin, and although he never really wanted children, engages with them more than April does, reading them the 'funnies' and sympathizing with Jennifer when she cries about moving away. Although he dislikes his job and many of his close friends, Frank is content to muddle through his life, finding joy is other things. April on the other hand is frenetic, confused, dissatisfied, and desperate. She fails to understand Franks's contentment and shuns his attempts to keep the peace throughout the novel. She is cold and quick to anger around her children, treating them as an obligation rather than a gift. She feels unsupported and lost in her adult life, stemming from an unstable childhood moving from relative to relative, and receiving no real care and attention. Unable to reach out and trapped in a life she never wanted with a man she never really felt that strongly for, she struggles to accept Frank's flaws and expects more of him than he can give. Frank is left an "empty shell of a man" after the novel, condemned to raise the children with their uncle, mirroring April's upbringing and therefore perpetuating the ugly circle.
The Campbells represent another unstable family. She has trouble relating to his four children, feeling revulsion when he comes across them all watching the TV, they pay no attention to him, showing a dislocation in their family bonds. She seems to care for Millie but is too busy being preoccupied with thinking about April Wheeler, another man's wife, to listen to his own. She loves the idea of April, but after sleeping with her in the car at the Log Cabin, he is faced with her reality "I don't know who I am". April is far more complex than Shep gives her credit for, as he just thinks of her physically.
The Givings family is the tightest one in the novel, despite its flaws. Helen attempts to include John in society instead of shunning him. It is revealed that Helen only married Howard because he was the only boy who ever paid her any attention, but despite this, they seem to work together well in handling John and so make a good pairing. The Givings represent a lack of communication, which in the end is the downfall of the Wheelers. Yates decides to end the novel with Helen and Howard, with Howard turning off his hearing aid as Helen talks, symbolizing the cold carelessness of modern society and the lack of anyone who truly listens.
Conformity
Conformity pervades Revolutionary Road and is one of the central motivators towards the tragedy at the end of the narrative. The novel is set in the New York suburbs of 1955, deep in the sprawl of the mass-produced family homes built for the young baby boom families. The Wheelers are such a family; their home seems beautiful, sitting on a slight hill and sporting a picture window, however, it is less than ideal for April.
April Wheeler feels trapped in the conformity in which her society has sealed her. Frank goes out to work every day in the city, and the children go to school, leaving her to the house affairs alone in the house, day after day. From the outside the white picket fence and nuclear family seem perfect, however, 50s woman’s rights advocate Betty Friedan wrote that the suburbs were "burying women alive".
Frank is no happier in his job. He rides the train every day with hundreds of other anonymous businessmen, whose jobs give them little to no emotional satisfaction and will eventually be lost and forgotten in the system just as Frank's father, Earl Wheeler has been. Frank has returned from his time in the war feeling the need to constantly prove himself to others, to conform to their ideals because he can't see another point in his life. In contrast, April longs for something more, something cultured, that to her seems to be in Paris.
John Givings is an example of the opposite of a conformist. He stands out from his mother Helen, she enjoys the suburban dullness, losing it as a security blanket. John bonds well with the Wheelers because he identifies in them the same restlessness with the "hopeless emptiness" of their day-to-day lives. He is deemed insane by society, and although shows proof of this with violent outbursts, he is not completely mentally unsound. John acts as the truth-teller of the novel, breaking through the thick warm mist of suburban conformity and social conventions to instill the truth in people.
Madness
Madness is present in the novel primarily in the character of John Givings. It is John's narrative function to act as a truth teller. This suggests that although he is prone to violent outbursts and callous social behaviour, it is the madness that is his strength, allowing him to see through the other characters the truth of their situations. On his first visit to the Wheelers home, John reveals his brutal electro-shock therapy sessions, typical of psychiatric treatment of the time (immortalised most prominently in Ken Kesey’s' One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) which has made him forget the mathematics he used to be passionate about. The attitude of society in the 50s on mental illness was a taboo, knowledge was poor and patients were often given treatments that worsened their conditions.
Frank suggests April should go to see a "shrink" after her outburst and threatened abortion after the second part of the novel. This shows how any seemingly abnormal behaviour could be shunned and easily dismissed as a psychiatric issue without addressing the true issues at the root of any emotional distress.
Gender
Frank feels somewhat inadequate as a man. He doesn't live up to his father’s physicality, Yates writes about Frank's admiration of his father’s capable hands, and that his own will never match them. Frank is building a path to the house in the front garden in the first section of the novel and notes that the manual work and sweat on his brow make him feel like a man. This links masculinity to power and strength, which is also seen in Franks's treatment of April. On the subject of the abortion, Frank is not opposed to the idea itself, as he doesn't want a third child either, but hates the idea of April taking things into her own hands, getting the rubber syringe, and planning it without him. This offends his need for masculine dominance, and so he attempts to persuade her out of it, and when seemingly affective, feels the thrill of success. This is the same as when a similar situation occurred with April's first pregnancy earlier in their relationship.
April feels unfulfilled in her role as a suburban housewife. She is strong, stubborn, and independent mentally, which arouses conflict with Frank's gentle need for psychological dominance over her. She says she wants to support the family in Paris financially to allow Frank time to "find himself", yet really, this is a ploy to get Frank on board with allowing her a more outgoing and independent role in their relationship as a woman. The other women in Revolutionary Road are passive and content with their lives, such as Millie Campbell and Helen Givings. John Givings sees this difference and notes that April is 'female' instead of being 'feminine'. 'Female' means this stubborn spirit that April possesses, which is slowly crushed by her marriage and the suburbs, and 'feminine' means a more passive, patriarchy-pleasing personality
Sexual Morality
Sexual Morality is a smaller theme of the novel, yet it causes rifts in character relationships and affects the narrative's eventual outcome. Infidelity is often treated as a sin in earlier literature, however, in Yates’ novel, characters seem reserved and relatively guiltless about it. This theme links strongly to that of marriage and further highlights the fractured relationships between characters in this novel.
Early in the first part of the novel, Frank embarks on an affair with a woman from his office- Maureen Grube. All he sees in Maureen is her physical sexuality and is attracted to the way she moves. He goes back to her apartment after excusing them both from the office and having sex with her. It can be inferred that Frank does this multiple times throughout the novel before breaking it off in part three. This affair serves little more than Franks's need for dominance, to prove his masculinity which is an insecurity of his. Maureen treats it as something exciting and Yates never includes any information on her opinion of sleeping with a married man. After the first time with Maureen, Frank comes home to a happier April, who has switched from irritated and distant to affectionate seemingly overnight. April has thrown a birthday celebration for him and Frank feels guilty about just having slept with another woman but brushes it off. Frank’s feelings on the matter aren’t brought up again until the Wheeler's last big fight in Part Three. Here, in an attempt to open out and straighten their marriage, Frank tells April about his affair. April is cold and indifferent to this information, only asking him why he needs to tell her, thinking he is trying to get a reaction out of her. This shows just how broken their marriage is, there is no feeling there at all leading to April's revelation “It’s because I don’t love you. How’s that?”.
April herself also has an affair, with Shep Campbell the Wheeler’s friendly neighbor. Shep is attracted to April, her physicality, and her cool unshakable attitude (the very thing that causes fissures in her and Franks's relationship, she is detached and cold). Shep shows no guilt for sleeping with April, and to our knowledge never tells Millie, his wife. April sleeps with Shep as the climax of her identity crisis. She doesn’t know who she is anymore, her aspirations have crashed and burned, and she no longer understands what she wants or what she’s feeling. April's affair with Shep isn’t born from desire as Frank’s is with Maureen, but of desperation.
Freedom
Revolutionary Road navigates the tension between freedom and imprisonment, and how such themes functioned within the stifling containment culture of 1950s America. Ironically, although the Wheelers are financially free, they cannot escape the shackles of suburbia. As Frank himself claims in his criticism of middle-class society, it was like being 'encased in some kind of Cellophane for years without knowing it.' The claustrophobic 'cultural tradition' of 'optimistic, smiling-through, easy-way-out sentimentality' threatens to suffocate the Wheelers and imprison them within their perfect nuclear family home. 'This whole country', Frank claims, is 'rotten'.
Having lost faith in the American dream, Frank thus concludes that the only way to achieve true freedom is to pursue a Parisian one, vowing to move to 'the only part of the world worth living in'. In contrast to his restrictive, sedentary life in the suburbs, Paris functions as a symbol of romance, liberty, individualism, rebellion, culture, and sophistication. Having previously served there during WWII, Frank associates the city with the excitement of his glory days at the front, harking back to a time when he felt alive, valued, free, and 'full of blood.' What Frank wants is to feel brave, manly, and special, even if he is not.
